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defense. Every day, locals lined up out-
side a temporary fire station in West
Mosul and asked for help retrieving
the bodies of their relatives. “ We re-
corded their names and gave them a
date,” he recalled. “And when their date
came they would come with us to the
Old City and show us the house that
had been hit by an air strike, and we
would dig until we could take out the
body.”
The coalition has acknowledged a
civilian death toll in the low hundreds.
But the West Mosul civil defense has
retrieved thousands of corpses from the
Old City. Last December, the Associ-
ated Press obtained a list of nearly ten
thousand civilians whose bodies had
been registered at the local morgue.
Most had been crushed to death by
falling concrete; for others, the cause
of death had been entered into the
morgue’s database simply as “blown to
pieces.” (Thomas Veale, a U.S. Army
colonel and a spokesman for the coa-
lition, told the A.P. that it was “irre-
sponsible” to draw attention to civilian
casualties in West Mosul. If not for the
coalition’s campaign, he said, Iraqis
would have suffered years of “needless
death and mutilation” at the hands of
“terrorists who lack any ethical or moral
standards.”)
“All of them are civilians,” Moham-
mad said. “ W hen we find unknown
bodies, we leave them behind,” because
there would be no way to apply for a
death certificate or to return a corpse
to its family for burial. “Sometimes
people come here and tell us that they
have dead relatives in the Old City, but
we know that they are not f rom the
Old City,” Mohammad said. “ They are
from Qayyarah or Shirqat,” towns where
the Islamic State had more support.
When that happens, civil-defense work-
ers infer an ISIS link and refuse to re-
trieve the corpse.
The skeletons in the rubble have
not been picked clean by animals, or
bleached white by the sun. There are
fingernails and yellow teeth and dusty
clumps of hair. Bone fragments line
the roads, amid scraps of fabric and
leather and glass. Near the river, I saw
a torso dangling loosely from a mess
of twisted rebar—swaying hands, frac-
tured skull. Blackened ligaments drooped
from the arms. “Daesh,” a stranger said
to me, smoking a cigarette, pointing at
the corpse. He kept moving.
Nearby, I met Thenoon Younnes
Abdullah. He waved, and carefully
wound his way down a three-story
pile of rubble—the site of his former
home—with his ten-year-old son. The
family had returned to salvage what-
ever they could. Everything of any value
had already been looted, but they res-
cued a broken generator, and tied it to
the back of their car.
Abdullah told me that, after the bat-
tle, his cousins were the first in his fam-
ily to return to the Old City; as soon
as they opened their door, they were
blown apart by I.E.D.s. Months later,
when Abdullah arrived, he found his
own house in ruins, and several dead
ISIS fighters inside. He also found Alaa’s
mother’s corpse; she had stayed behind,
too frail to run away.
Abdullah led me up the hill of tan-
gled metal and concrete, and we en-
tered his house by ducking under a
staircase, through a hole in the bath-
room wall. On the floor of the dining
room were three stains, where fluids had
leaked out as the bodies decomposed.
Abdullah’s brother died across the street,
but his body hasn’t been found.
It was difficult to move. The floor
was littered with debris, but I noticed
transistors, ball bearings, and other
bomb-making materials scattered about.
Then, on my way out, my foot knocked
over a concrete block and uncovered
an I.E.D. I stopped, and noticed two
other unexploded bombs a few feet
away, as well as four detonators. We
climbed back out through the hole in
the bathroom wall, and came down
the hill, past an ISIS corpse in rotting
leather sandals.
Reconstruction in the Old City will
cost billions of dollars, according to
the U.N., but, aside from the exorbi-
tant cost, I had the impression that
the Iraqi government has been con-
tent to leave it in ruins, as a kind of
punishment. Abdullah told me that he
had seen no evidence of institutional
cleanup—only posters from N.G.O.s,
warning about the perils of walking in
areas filled with unexploded ordnance,
which still regularly kills people in the
Old City.
Abdullah and his family piled into
SHORT TALK ON HOMER AND JOHN ASHBERY
In the twenty-fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey the souls of the
suitors all go down to Hades. Hermes leads them, gibbering like
bats, past various under world landmarks, the white rock of Leukas,
etc., and on their way they pass the δῆμον ὀνείρων, which Homer
leaves undescribed and unexplained. Δῆμον means “people, population
or country.” Όνείρων means “dream.” A demographic of dreams.
My friend Stanley Lombardo, translator, translates it “the dream
deme.” But so how would this work? Is it a big file catalogue with
all the dreams waiting in alphabetical order to go appear inside some
head at night? Or standing around easy with drinks and anecdotes?
Or so bored with signifying they’re lying on the ground in heaps?
Do they have a gift shop? Does it sell books by Adorno? Are there
factions and animosities and a row of chairs like an audition? A smell
of sweat? Exhaustion and tears? Or is it blissful, beyond meaning,
barefoot, organized by gentle bells? Do they have to practice all the
time to keep in dream shape or is it like having perfect pitch? Are
there dream trees to shade them and small dream boys who climb
up and sit quiet while others search for them gradually losing heart?
Do their dream streets fill with mobs drifting fast and slow at once
over the sidewalk, each sealed into a private membrane as clear and
dense and general as death? If there are dogs in the dreams do they
need to be walked? If Freud is there (“I know I am overdue!”) is he
aloof or enjoying himself ? Down the road from the summer cottage
of my friend Stanley Lombardo is a farm where emus and llamas
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